Author
Topic: The big 'ole Raspberry Pi topic (Read 37536 times)

A bit like Science (my wife is a secondary-level Physics teacher) we should introduce programming to kids at an early age, try to present it in a positive light, and encourage them if they want to do it later on in their education, but not force them to.

<rant>The "presenting it in a positive light" is the difficult bit because society has been promoting anti-intellectualism for the last few decades, framing many academic subjects and careers, especially Scientists, Engineers, Developers, etc. as being social outcasts. Unfortunately we live in a world where ignorance and dishonesty is often valued and rewarded over knowledge and integrity.

Despite living in a world where technology surrounds us, the last 2 or 3 generations of kids leaving education seem to have less understanding of computers than those who went to school in the 1980s.

It's encouraging that this is being recognised a bit (at least in the UK) but the approaches being taken to remedy the situation seem pretty ineffective and, in some cases, counter-productive.</rant>

I will get some stick for this but I'm convinced that political correctness has pushed our modern society into the celebration of mediocrity. There is no such a thing as equality in nature, some animals are stronger some are more intelligent, others are faster etc, to ignore that is completely stupid.

I'm all for equal rights for everyone but don't tone down the education level in favor of the least intelligent pupil. Make sure that each student gets the level of education that will develop his/her talents to the fullest.

I would argue that Political Correctness is a thing because the application of "fairness" in society is often misplaced or misappropriated.

But in the case of STEM in UK schools, the problem isn't Political Correctness. It's clueless Government desperately trying to address a problem that is of their own making and applying some band-aids.

By the way, this isn't a dig at any particular party. Governments of all colours and sizes (including LEAs) have been complicit in this, back from the early 90s when they removed IT from the curriculum and replaced it with secretarial skills (aka. how to use MS Office). Microsoft was pretty much gifted the education market and were allowed to indoctrinate management, teachers, and kids with their ecosystem. I wonder how many people got back-handers from that!

Now they are trying to fix this and other problems by forcing kids, including disruptive kids who really don't have the skills for STEM, to study Science and Maths to A Level whether they want to or not. And, yes, it drags the smart kids down.

Keeping kids in school this way also keeps them off the unemployment stats.

The other motivation for this (and this is party specific) is school league tables: the current Government seem hell-bent on wresting control of schools from LEAs (who they only have limited control over) and league tables is the blunt instrument they are using: the aim is to be able to judge schools as "failing" and then turn them into Academies or Free Schools.

For instance, a lot of kids aren't capable of getting a GCSE or A-Level in Science, but could probably get a BTEC qualification. In my wife's old school they had a lot of kids on the BTEC track. The Government have now changed the measurements so that BTEC no longer counts, and that has resulted in schools pushing these kids into GCSEs and A-Levels instead just to keep the stats up and to avoid being seen as "failing".

Me, I would like to have access to PHP and Ruby as CLI as well as part of Apache/Rails. PHP because it's a language I know quite well and have already written a cronjob for the heck of it. As for Ruby, it's a lnaguage I really would like to have a go at.

Currently, I have php5-cli installed (because I needed at least something), but I haven't installed Apache or Ruby (or Rails).

What would you recommend I do an't don't install to do this?

Not that I won't use Python, but that's obviously already pre-installed on the Pi.

Question aside, I have a project in mind that involves a facial expression recognition algorithm developed by Fraunhofer IIS and see if I can make it into an interactive music player. It's a bit of a branch-out fromt he uni project I did with a group not that long ago.

Logged

Guitar, banjo, mandolin and piano, bass and percussion only when neededProduction and mixing

The filesystem keeps crashing. This will be the fourth time within 2-3 weeks that I have to re-image the OS onto the SD card. However, I used diskpart this time to clean up the disk first before burning. Maybe it helps, I don't know.

I do shut it down correctly with iether halt -p or shutdown -h now, but it still seems to crap out at one out of a couple boot-ups.

Logged

Guitar, banjo, mandolin and piano, bass and percussion only when neededProduction and mixing

Could it be that your (micro)SD card is faulty? Have you tried already with a new card?Did you upgrade your system to the latest versions?

I never had any of those issues but then again I never shut down the PI. My biggest issue I have had so far with the raspi is that for no clear reason it shuts down the SSH daemon after a while leaving it inaccessible from the network, which is a pain in then neck since you have to connect a keyboard and screen to log in and restart the SSH daemon.

I too have had sd card issues with Pi. The card is fine but simply not suited to the Pi. Same thing with my android based Nook HD... the software vendor even sells his known good sd cards just to make life easier if you run his os.

There are usually lists of known good, iffy, and flat just won't word.. .sd cards that otherwise would be fine.

It's the only microSD card I have, so no, not yet. I have updated/upgraded (in that order, too) tothe latest version.

I have the Integral SDHC 16GB class 10 Ultima Pro card that's on this list. I screwed it up once by expanding filesystem after installing updates, but it kept failing at random boot-ups since. Sometimes it even boots up fine after throwing errors and rebooting it. Just not always.

Logged

Guitar, banjo, mandolin and piano, bass and percussion only when neededProduction and mixing

Figured it out. I thought my Pi was off a couple of times, while in reality it just dropped the WiFi adapter for some reason, making SSH connection impossible.

Yesterday it happened (without yet knowing what really happened), when I couldn't connect, hooked up keyboard and monitor to discovered the Pi was still running but just not connected.

So what I did in essence, was powering down the system without halting it first.

At least I got nginx to work again in 20 minutes instead of 2 hours that it took me originally. I will however install MySQL since I couldn't quite get PostgresQL to work. I had it down to the point where both Pi and pgAdmin could connect to the database, but I couldn't figure out how to create a table in pgAdmin and the PDO (PHP) query creating a database didn't show up in pgAdmin.

Logged

Guitar, banjo, mandolin and piano, bass and percussion only when neededProduction and mixing

Right, so I'm having a confusing ole' time trying to set-up static IPs for multiple networks the Pi could be connected to.

One is always wireless, because the router is outside the house, the other could be either wireless or by cable, from one of two APs.

How do I set this up? I keep having to hook up a monitor to see what's actually going on (and I do end up getting it to work). I'd like the Pi to autoconnect to whatever of its known routers is in range. Right now, when I boot it up when I'm near the second configured router, it still scansfor the first one.

I haven't bothered messing with eth0 settings since I don't have a monitor near those places so I can't see what I"m doing and I obviously can't SSH to the Pi when I don't know 1) if it's connected and 2) what its IP actually is or 3) if I butchered the interfaces or wpa_supplicant.conf files in the process.

Right now, all I've written down is the "address" line in the interfaces file, and the wireless networks have "id_str" assigned in wpa_supplicant.conf file.

I've only been looking at it in more depth on one router, but when it's set to dhcp, virtual hosts (port forwarding) works, but once I set "address" to something like 192.168.1.113 (outside the dhcp pool), I can find it on LAN (from my computer or from my phone), but the router doesn't want to forward to it (so I can't access it from outside the network unless it's set to dhcp)

That's a lot of issues in a single post.

ETA: xx--xx it, have screenshots! interfaces:wpa_supplicant.conf:

ETAM:route -n says the gateway is 0.0.0.0, so that basically means it's got no gateway to the outside world, right?

« Last Edit: April 20, 2015, 11:33:18 pm by Cue Zephyr »

Logged

Guitar, banjo, mandolin and piano, bass and percussion only when neededProduction and mixing